Bachmann battles Perry's shadow

It’s an unusual message for the Minnesota congresswoman who rocketed toward the top in the polls after joining the race in June and finished first in the Ames straw poll last Saturday.

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But one week off that triumph, Bachmann is feeling the effects of the latest GOP comet, Rick Perry. Her momentum, which ought to be on the rise, suddenly shows signs of ebbing amid questions of her electability. Her privileged position as the newest, hottest candidate in the GOP field has been usurped by the Texas governor, who’s also sped past her in the polls.

At campaign rallies in South Carolina on Friday, she told audiences she’s already come from behind to win once so far. Striking a defiant tone, she reminded the crowd — and the political world — she can’t be counted out.

“You may have heard last Saturday there was a little election in Iowa, and I was the No. 1 winner of the Iowa straw poll,” she told an overheated crowd at a midday town hall in Myrtle Beach. “That victory was even more stunning than it was reported — I had only been a candidate for 49 days … and I had spent about half the time in Washington, D.C., fighting against” raising the debt ceiling.

The Iowa line was a new addition to her campaign rhetoric, seemingly designed to signal that the tea party champion would not be pushed out of the conversation by her more mainstream rivals. As most of the GOP establishment looks ahead to a Mitt Romney-Perry showdown — or pines for still more new entrants — Bachmann is intent on making sure Republicans remember she is a force to be reckoned with.

The day after Ames, she RSVP’d to a GOP dinner in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, after Perry announced he’d be speaking there. And this week, she canceled planned events in New Hampshire to spend four days in the Carolinas again — planting a flag in the state where Perry announced his candidacy last weekend and to which he returned on Friday.

Still, in the second time they crossed paths on the trail, there was no mistaking which candidate is the flavor of the moment.

In the small northeastern town of Florence on Thursday, Bachmann drew a crowd of perhaps 150 people to a meeting room at the civic center for an afternoon rally. Even as she spoke, drawing predictable cheers for her crowd-friendly chant of “One! Term! President!”, many in the crowd were buzzing about Perry coming to town.